The Beauty of Transformation as Discovered Through Four Artists

There will be many moments in your life when you first view a scene, an object, a sunset or even a face that takes your breath away. You will stand in awe for a moment as your spirit, soul, or heart absorbs the beauty of what you are observing. Part of that experience is wired to observing the wonder of how such a great work of art came into being. How can something so beautiful be created? We see this form of beauty in the sculptures of veiled women that are created out of marble. This subject was a very popular one back in the 1800’s throughout Italy. The artist’s Antonio Corradini, Giuseppe Croff and Ravaello Monti were the leading artists to embrace this subject matter, and they produced such breath taking sculptures as shown below and in the following video.

The artist Christo Claude and his wife produced such breath taking art as well. Their sculptures were not of marble or stone but were made from man made materials like cloth, pipes and various materials. The beauty and awesome dynamic of their art was taking a pre-visualization of a subject and imagine it being transformed through redefining it to match their sketches. Within the video and the following lesson below you will see one of the greatest transformation artists that ever lived.

Your assignment follows at the end of this reading as well as described at the end of the video.

“The work of art is a scream of freedom.” —Christo

As we grow into adulthood we all go through various forms of transformations. Some of those gateways are wonderful and some are painful. The human brain has a healthy habit of taking the most difficult times and transforming them into memories that it can cope with. The beautiful memories get transformed into becoming an essence of memory where we can use our senses to recall a wonderful memory.

Transformation is what the artist Christo is all about. As a young artist he would take objects and wrap them in plastic to observe how the form changed. He began videotaping his art in this way and soon he started producing what are called site specific environmental art by taking his art to nature. He funded his projects by first producing a series of sketches and then selling them to museums around the world. Here are some of his massive projects that he produced with his wife Jeanne-Claude.

Running Fence was an installation art piece by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which was completed on September 10, 1976. The art installation was first conceived in 1972, but the actual project took more than four years to plan and build.  After it was installed, the builders removed it 14 days later, leaving no visible trace behind.

Running Fence

While they often insisted that the aesthetic properties of their art constituted its primary value, reactions from audiences and critics worldwide have long recognized a broader commentary operating across their work, and themes ranging from environmental degradation, to the vexed history of the 20th century and the Cold War, to the perseverance of democratic and humanist ideals.

Wrapped Coast 1969

Using one million square feet of erosion-control synthetic fabric, 35 miles of polypropylene rope, 25,000 fasteners, threaded studs, and clips, Jeanne-Claude and Christo wrapped 1.5 miles of rocky coast off Little Bay in Sydney, Australia to create Wrapped Coast in the late 1960s. This method of wrapping was something that Christo had experimented with previously, using smaller objects, but this monumental effort became the largest single artwork ever created at the time, surpassing Mount Rushmore. It remained wrapped for ten weeks, beginning October 28, 1969.

The draping of the fabric over the coast helped to re-contextualize and de-familiarize a well-known natural setting, and revealed the essential form and shape of the coast as a discrete object in and of itself. Passersby experienced a shift in their commonplace perspective of the landscape by having limitations - both visual and physical - imposed upon the viewing process. This selective imposition also brought about new and unexpected revelations about the nature of the coastline, particularly its formal and structural qualities as a cohesive object with a distinct shape, substance, and volume.

Valley Curtain (1975)

In the Spring of 1970 Christo and Jeanne-Claude began work on Valley , a 200,200 square foot section of orange, woven nylon fabric that stretched across an entire Colorado valley. The gigantic, crescent-shaped fabric was suspended on a steel cable and anchored to two mountain tops, between Grand Junction and Glenwood Springs in the Hogback Mountain Range. It was tied down with 27 ropes, and spread across the valley at a maximum measurement of 1,250 feet wide and 365 feet high.

Valley Curtain was a tremendous feat of engineering and coordination that experienced significant and expensive setbacks. Christo and his team first attempted to install the curtain on October 9, 1971, but a gust of wind caught the fabric and it flew away, ripping on the surrounding rocks and construction equipment. On August 19, 1972 it was at last erected successfully, but it remained intact for only 28 hours, until a wind at over 60 miles per hour threatened to tear through it once more. Workers dismantled the piece shortly thereafter.

For the brief time that it was in place, the bright orange drape slung between the craggy mountains reinvigorated the valley's contours, highlighting its natural flow, rhythm, and volume. Like many of the duo's large-scale environmental works, it brought new perspective to a familiar landscape, and encouraged a refreshed appreciation of the natural world. The bold color of the fabric popped against the bright sky, the muted blue mountains in the distance, and the greenery covering the nearby hills. Few viewers were able to see it live in its short, 28-hour existence, which added to the work's sense of fragility, vulnerability, and urgency, while also stimulating an awareness of the emptiness that accompanied its eventual dismantling. The work was documented extensively in photographs: ultimately, the most prolific medium of earth works, these types of works which are purposely subjected to environmental change, impermanence, and decay.

Transformation Assignment

Transformation Assignment: In your sketchbook, choose any object draw a series of sketches as to how you project the subject will appear just as Christo did. Try to project how you want the object to be transformed. In doing so you are using your creative imagination. This process is called pre-visualization. Wrap your subject in the material of your choice such as plastic wrap, cloth, foil etc. Notice how the form is changed along with the context of the form. In the sample below a wine bottle is transformed into a dramatic form. You must transform your thinking from a context of any object to that of an emotional shape of beauty.

If you do not have an immediate object then project how your hand would look if it had been wrapped in a white cloth. Observe the folds in your minds eye as to how it would appear. Observe the shadows and the detail of each finger being wrapped tight. Remember, you are drawing from the right side of your mind. There is no wrong way to draw this even though the left side of your brain tells you that it is incorrect. Now, using white material or plastic wrap see if you can recreate the very same image from your projected drawing by making a photo of the image. Paste the photo and the drawing next to each other in your sketchbook.

Discuss in class how this assignment made you think and feel with regards to the process and what you achieved in your photo and drawing.